Looking for Mr. Goodbar by Judith Rossner

intense were the two feelings that this little speech aroused in her—the pleasure that he had chosen her and the anxiety aroused by the very mention of the fact that at some point he would go away. This wasn’t a reality she was prepared to face—that there would be a time when she could not see him for two solid months.
    He lived across the street from the Museum of Natural History so she would have no trouble finding it. She didn’t tell him she’d never been there. That she’d never been on Central Park West.That in point of fact she’d seldom in her entire life been out of the Bronx before she began attending City, except to go to doctors and hospitals, and then her father drove her. It wasn’t until he gave her the apartment number—12B—that she ceased to picture the room where her richest fantasies occurred as being on the second floor of the mansion in Gone With the Wind.
    Where would his wife be while they were working?
    She couldn’t tell how old he was but she thought if he had children they would be young.
    They would have to be someplace quiet, the two of them, if they were going to get any work done. That was for sure.
    She woke up at four in the morning on the first day that she was to go, having dreamed that she was locked with him in a tiny closet while outside there were thunder and lightning. Other children were banging at the door, screaming to get in, and she said maybe they should open the door but he said that there just wasn’t room in that tiny space, even though the two of them were huddled close together under a blanket.
    The dream was so delicious that she tried to get back into it but she was tense and excited and couldn’t fall asleep at all.
    When she told the elevator operator she wanted 12B he nodded and said, “Dr. Engle,” which didn’t strike her really until he let her off and the door facing her read “Helen Engle, M.D.” She turned to the elevator operator and stammered, “I—I—”
    “Is it the professor you wanted?” he asked.
    She nodded. Her lips were dry.
    He took her back down and directed her to an elevator in the back explaining that this was the entrance the professor’s people used during the doctor’s office hours.
    The professor’s people.
    She was taken back up in a somewhat larger but less elegant elevator. She was nearly suffocating with tension.
    He opened the door, yawning, looking barely awake. She wondered what the elevator operator thought. She mumbled “Thank you” to the operator without looking at him. Martin Engle was wearing a bathrobe.
    “Come in,” he said, “but don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee.”
    She walked into a large foyer, ahead of which was a living room—not elegant, as the lobby had been, but comfortable looking. Full of big overstuffed furniture and bookcases. He walked off into another hallway; she stood indecisively until he called, “Come, come, come,” at which she followed him into a messy kitchen. He began pouring water into a strange glass contraption on the stove.
    “My wife is an otherwise perfect human being who cannot make a decent cup of coffee.”
    She laughed nervously. The water that he was pouring into the top of the glass thing was dripping down to the bottom as coffee.
    His wife was a doctor. An otherwise perfect woman.
    “You may sit down. You may even take off your coat and put down your books.”
    She never took her eyes off him as he poured the coffee, fussed over it, brought cream and sugar, cups and spoons to the table, then did something with the glass coffeepot and brought that, too.
    They drank their first cup in silence. (She had come to love coffee! When she drank it she was with him.) She began to relax, to feel at home, but then as that phrase, at home, entered her mind she felt uneasy again because it wasn’t her own home, although she had been feeling as though it were. Somewhere within a few hundred yards of her, separated by maybe two or three walls, was a lady